home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Understanding McLuhan
/
Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
/
pc
/
mcluhan.dxr
/
06688_Field_TCUM T253.txt
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1996-04-10
|
948b
|
16 lines
subconscious mandate to announce the end of all “rational” or
visual values. He was acting like Pip in Dickens’ Great
Expectations . Pip was a poor boy who had a hidden benefactor
who wanted to raise Pip to the status of a gentleman. Pip was
ready and willing until he found that his benefactor was an
escaped convict. Spengler and Hitler and many more of the
would-be “irrationalists” of our century are like singing-telegram
delivery boys, who are quite innocent of any understanding of
the medium that prompts the song they sing.
So far as Tobias Dantzig is concerned in his Number: The
Language of Science , the progress from the tactile fingering of
toes and fingers to “the homogeneous number concept, which
made mathematics possible” is the result of visual abstraction
from the operation of tactile manipulation. We have both
extremes of this process in our daily speech. The gangster term